Real intellectuals do not do political biography. Biography as a genre is suspect because it lends itself to a discourse of old fashioned narrative, beginning with the life and parentage of the subject and heading predictably towards death and posthumous reputation. Political biography is doubly suspect because it carries with it a whiff of the 'great man in history' heresy. This suggests that if Halifax and not Churchill had become prime minister of Britain in 1940, or if Al Gore had won the presidential elections in the United States in 2000, the world somehow would not have been absolutely identical to the world we know today. Political biography, at least since Plutarch nearly two thousand years ago, is also prone to contamination with a moral agenda, or at the very least to an implication that the lives of past statesmen may convey lessons and examples to the political leaders of our own generation. (And my use of the term 'statesman' will alert the perceptive reader to the further danger that, since individuals of the masculine persuasion have traditionally exercised political power, political biography is ineradicably flawed with gender bias.) So it is that the practitioner of political biography may be compared to an old-fashioned craftsman in an Alpine village laboriously carving cuckoo clocks by time-honoured methods, while in the big town in the valley below the Swatch factory is turning out bright new up-to-the-minute products replete with every new device fresh from the laboratories of culture studies and post-modernism. Yet, curiously, political biography survives. Even the most transient and mediocre of American presidents is embalmed in a mausoleum of four, five, or six fat volumes, with a library of presidential papers the pride and joy of his home town campus.
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